Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Sheila Heti: 'I love dirty books'

The
Canadian has become a literary sensation in the US with a novel drawing heavily
on her own life and philosophy. Here she talks about art, female friendship and
sexual honesty

Sheila Heti in New York: 'I'll never write
a book in this way again.' Photograph: Mike McGregor for the
Observer

Sheila Heti's novel, How
Should a Person Be?, has taken the States by storm. Dubbed "HBO's
Girls in book form", it's a mash-up of memoir, fiction, self-help and
philosophy.

The book, published here this week, has divided critics. The New
Yorker's James Wood applauded Heti's "freedom from pretentiousness and
cant", but called the book "hideously narcissistic". Margaret Atwood described
it as a "seriously strange but funny plunge into the quest for authenticity";
while artist and film-maker Miranda July declared it "nothing less than
groundbreaking: in form, sexually, relationally, and as a major literary
work".How Should a Person Be? is structured like a literary version of
reality TV. The narrator, Sheila, is a playwright, recently divorced, who is
suffering from writer's block. In real life Heti had just divorced her husband
of three years, and was trying to write a play for a feminist theatre company –
which instead became How Should a Person Be?.

Set in Heti's native
Toronto, the book is based on the author's own conversations with her artist
friends (the character Margaux is Heti's real friend, painter Margaux
Williamson), her analyst and her relationship with Israel, the man with whom she
has intense, brutal sex.

But, in the spirit of the 19th-century bildungsroman, the book also asks
questions such as: What does it mean to be an artist? What is ugly and what is
beautiful? And how do we live a moral life?Full piece.